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December 22nd would have been the 129th birthday of the legendary Indian mathematician Srinivasa
Ramanujan, who recently achieved wider fame through the film The man who knew infinity. His story really is remarkable. Born in 1887 in a small village around 400km
from Madras (now Chennai), Ramanujan developed a passion for maths
very early on. By age 15 he routinely solved maths problems
that went way beyond what his classmates were dealing with. He worked out his own method for solving quartic equations, for example, and even had a go at quintic ones (and failed of course, since the general quintic is unsolvable). But since he neglected all other
subjects apart from maths, Ramanujan never got into university, and was forced to continue
studying maths alone and in poverty. Only after a plea to an eminent mathematician, who described Ramanujan as "A short uncouth figure, stout, unshaven, not over clean," did Ramanujan eventually get a job as a clerk at the Madras Port Trust.

It was during his time at the Port Trust that Ramanujan decided to write a letter that was to change his
life. It was addressed to the famous Cambridge number theorist G. H. Hardy who, accustomed to this early-twentieth-century form of spam, was irritated at first: a letter from an unknown Indian containing crazy-looking theorems and no proofs at all. But as he went about his day, Hardy couldn't quite forget about the script:

At the back of his mind [...] the Indian manuscript nagged away. Wild theorems. Theorems such as he had never seen before, nor imagined. A fraud of genius? A question was forming itself in his mind. As it was Hardy's mind,
the question was forming itself with epigrammatic clarity: is a fraud of genius more probable than an unknown mathematician of genius? Clearly the answer was no. Back in his rooms in Trinity, he had another look at the script. He sent word to Littlewood that they must have a discussion after hall...

Apparently it did not take them long. Before midnight they knew, and knew for certain. The writer of these manuscripts was a man of genius.

From the foreword by C. P. Snow to Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology

Hardy invited Ramanujan to
Cambridge, and on March 17, 1914 Ramanujan set sail for England to start one of the most fascinating
collaborations in the history of maths. Right from the start the pair
produced important results and Ramanujan made up for the gaps in his
formal maths education by taking a degree in Cambridge. Perhaps the most famous story to emerge from this period has Hardy visiting Ramanujan as he lay ill in bed. Hardy complained that the number of the taxi he had arrived in, 1729, was a boring number, and that he worried this was a bad omen. "No," Ramanujan replied, apparently without hesitation. "It is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways":

Unfortunately, Ramanujan's sickness wasn't a one-off. His health had always been feeble, and the cold weather and unaccustomed English food didn't help. Ramanujan decided to return to India in
1919 and died the following year, aged only 33. He is still celebrated as one of India's greatest mathematicians.

You can find out more about Ramanujan's mathematics in these Plus articles:

If you're in or near London, then you might want to get yourself to the Museum of London on Tuesday to see the first in a series of public lectures about maths, given by one of our favourite mathematicians, Chris Budd. The lectures will show how relevant mathematics is to all of our lives, and the process by which mathematical ideas move from the abstract to the practical, and also transfer technology between very different disciplines. Whilst introducing you to some advanced modern mathematical ideas, these lectures will start from an elementary level, be accessible to all, and will be packed with examples, many of which will be drawn from directly from Budd's own experience as an applied mathematician.

The lectures will take place on Tuesdays at 1pm, they are free and no reservation is required. See the Gresham College website for more details.

Good news for all those who love maths and trying out puzzles, games, problems and generally cool and interesting maths type things! The Annual MathsJam Conference is on this November! A number of talks have already been proposed including teaching tiny horses to count, cheese, pizza and other food based problems, unreal real numbers, and a newly discovered thing. There's also a baking competition, a competition competition (yes, and it makes total sense), a t-shirt competition, and lots of good stuff. You can register here, as well as find out how to offer a talk, an activity, competition or cake if so inspired – have fun Jammers!

Nira Chamberlain uses maths to solve difficult problems in engineering and industry. He tells us how solving these problems can be like fighting an invisible boxer, and how he loves the feeling of having succeeded — because "the harder the battle, the sweeter the victory!"

Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb has a fascinating job: she works on the mathematics behind image analysis. It finds application in all sorts of areas, from medical imaging, such as MRI scans, to forest ecology, which sees scientists trying to gain information about forests from pictures taken from the air.

In this brief interview Carola tells us why she likes doing maths, recalls some of her favourite mathematical moments, and explains why creativity is essential in mathematics.